People are rightly concerned that the environment on earth could change in ways that would make life harder for everyone who lives on this planet. We need a good plan on how to maintain our environment, but making a plan like this has been very hard. People fund fake research to influence our decisions. They want us to make rules to block their competitions and protect their businesses.
We influence the environment in so many different ways.
- there is significantly less dust blowing into the oceans because of extra plant cover.
- Reliance on fossil fuels has released a lot more CO2 from the ground onto the surface.
- cows release methane
- monoculture farming destroys our rich ecology
- fertalizers, herbacides, and pestacides going into the ocean
- plastic trash
- chemicals that damage the ozone layer
It isn't clear which of these ways we influence the environment is harmful, and it isn't clear what we should do to stop any environmental damage that could come from these influences.
Besides minimizing our influences, we can also do active terraforming to maintain the climate. For example, by planting trees, or putting dust in the ocean, or capturing CO2.
Saving the environment is important, so it is important that any money or time we invest in protecting the environment is effective. If some company lobbys us to spend the entire environmental budget buying their solar panels, and we neglect all the other ways humans impact the environment, that could be very bad. It is so difficult to research all this ecology science to figure out how to effectively save the environment, no one person can know everything about ecology.
So how do we decide on how to invest our time and money to save the environment? Unfortunately, today we make these decisions using governance mechanisms which are vulnerable to bribery and propaganda.
Some of these decisions are made by voting, but voting is not an effective tool in this case. The individual cost of being an informed voter is high. The environment is hugely complicated, no one person could be fully informed about all the different ways we impact the environment, and all the potential strategies we could use to fix it. It would cost years and years of effort to become an informed voter. The individual benefit of being an informed voter is almost zero. Any individual's vote is so improbably likely to matter, that the dollar value of your vote is almost 0. If saving the environment will make you as an individual $10 million richer, but there are 100 million voters in the country, then your vote is only worth $0.10 to you, at best. Since the cost of being an informed voter is high, and the gain of being an informed voter is <$0.10, the rational voter would not waste their time becoming an informed voter. The ration voter votes from the position of ignorance. This makes them vulnerable to propaganda and social bandwagoning influences.
So voting is not an effective method to protect our environment.
The other way people make decisions about how to protect the environment is by putting someone in charge of the decision. Like a president or governor. This strategy is vulnerable to bribery and lobbying. Anyone who has a financial interest in how the laws are written could profit by influencing the decision maker. They might bribe scientists to make fake research. They might bribe the president directly. They might use propaganda to convince voters to make phone calls to their congressmen. The people who happen to be good at politics aren't always the best at environmental science.
So putting someone in charge is not an effective method to protect our environment.
We need an effective method to make decisions about how we will protect the environment, it needs these properties:
- it needs to be impossible for rich people to influence the outcome to protect their business.
- it needs to make the right decision, even if the vast majority of people can't tell if it is right or wrong.
Using game theory, it is possible to build mechanisms with these properties. Usually, these types of games are called "Futarchy". It is a way for groups of people to make the best decisions possible. Futarchy is a tool for distilling knowledge from crowds of people as efficiently as possible, and using that knowledge to make a good decision.
There are lots of ways to optimize futarchy for your situation, I will just give a simple example of futarchy. Someone has a plan to lower CO2 by capturing it. They make promises about how much lower the CO2 concentrations will be in 6 months if we buy their plan.
So we want to find out if their plan is worth investing in. We ask a blockchain oracle whether we will buy the CO2 capture plan, or not. We ask a second oracle whether the CO2 concentrations will be lower than the goal in 6 months, or not.
We make a market with 4 possible outcomes:
- we buy the plan, and CO2 concentration is high.
- we buy the plan, and CO2 concentration is low.
- we don't buy the plan, and CO2 concentration is high.
- we don't buy the plan, and CO2 concentration is low.
If (price of 1) * (price of 4) is lower than (price of 2) * (price of 3), then that means the futarchy says it is a good plan.
If someone makes bets to manipulate the prices in these markets, it actually makes the market more accurate. Bad bets in a market are a prize for someone else to come and make good bets. They bring more attention to the market, and end up making it more accurate than it would have been otherwise. This means that futarchy is resistent against rich people using their money to influence the outcome.
People who research the environment can make profit by making good bets in markets like these. People who don't understand the environment would prefer to not participate, because they will just lose their money. So these types of markets are accurate even if the vast majority of people don't understand the environment.
Futarchy has exactly the properties we need in an effective tool for protecting the environment.